[WEB400] Re: visit counters

[Hans Boldt <boldt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Franz wrote:
> Is there a way to count visitors on a static page (html only)?
> Management wants to know.
> jim

Others have provided some good technical answers. But the first question 
is: What exactly does management want to know? The logs will tell you 
how many "hits" your page received, but that's not very useful since 
many hits will be from bots, and not necessarily people (potential 
customers?) looking at your page on a monitor. Looking at the logs, you 
can sort by the user agent and then figure out which are bots and which 
are browsers (assuming the bots don't lie!).

As someone else pointed out, if you want to count the people viewing 
your page, you could count the hits to some unique image loaded by that 
page, since the bots generally have no need to fetch images.

Unfortunately, one thing the logs won't tell you is how long a visitor 
looks at your document, or if they even read past the title banner. 
Webmasters know that a lot of people will find their page in a Google 
search, have a quick glance, and decide immediately that they need to 
keep searching. Perhaps a more meaningful measurement is how many 
(non-bot) visitors actually bother to visit other pages on your web site.

Cheers! Hans